The CBS/Rather/Bush/Guard affair - regardless of how it
ultimately turns out - has brilliantly deflected the issue of
George W. Bush having strings pulled to get him into the Guard,
and then not fulfilling his service requirements. Anytime the
issue is raised in the future - regardless of facts or context -
partisan Republicans will simply dismiss it by saying, "Those
documents were forged." That four-word sound byte will be
remembered long after the details of Bush's failures have dimmed
from popular memory. Politically, it was a masterstroke.
And not only does it hurt Bush family enemy Kerry, but also
gets back at Bush family enemy Dan Rather, against whom they've
nursed a 16-year grudge.
The Bush family's hostility to Rather first broke the surface
of public attention back in 1988, when Vice President George H.W.
Bush was confronted on network television about his various roles
in the criminal affair now known as Iran/Contra. At the time,
rumors were flying that in the fall of 1980 then-VP-candidate Bush
had negotiated with Iran to hold the American hostages until after
the election. The hostages were not only held throughout the
election campaign, but were released the very hour Ronald Reagan
was sworn into office. The ongoing dragged-out hostage crisis (and
Carter's failed attempt at rescue) had knocked the incumbent
president down so far in the polls that the long-shot ticket of
Reagan/Bush won.
When it later came out, in part because of an investigation
started by Senator John Kerry, that after the 1980 election
Reagan/Bush were illegally selling American missiles to the
Iranians "in exchange for hostages" at a time there were
no hostages (the Iranian hostages had been freed, and the Lebanese
hostages not yet taken), speculation intensified. The key to
busting the whole deal open and indicting George H.W. Bush, some
congressional investigators believed, would be Bill Casey. As the
manager of the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign, he would have known of
the deal, and persistent allegations floated around Washington
that he'd even helped organize the initial negotiations between
Bush and Iranian representatives.
When Reagan/Bush took the White house, they elevated campaign
manager Casey to the role of Director of the CIA. And the
congressional committees looking into Iran/Contra so wanted to
talk with Casey that they took the rare step of subpoenaing a
sitting head of the CIA.
As White House insider Barbara Honegger wrote in her
groundbreaking book "October Surprise," Casey
"reportedly attended meetings in Paris, France, on October 19
and 20, 1980, with Iranian officials and agents of French
intelligence to arrange an arms-for-hostages-delay deal with Iran.
The morning of his first scheduled under-oath testimony before the
Senate Intelligence Committee on the secret Iran initiative he was
struck by seizures in his CIA headquarters office in Langley,
Virginia, and underwent speech-incapacitating left-brain surgery
shortly thereafter. Had he lived to testify, according to
life-long friend and counsel Milton Gould, Casey would have told
the 'entire truth.' He died on May 6, 1987."
Since the left temporal lobe of the brain - "Broca's
region" - controls speech, some "conspiracy minded"
folks suggested at the time that this was simply a hi-tech version
of the mob cutting out an informer's tongue.
Six months after Casey was silenced, on January 25, 1988 in a
CBS broadcast, Dan Rather cornered Vice President George H.W. Bush
about the whole Iran issue, and Bush became furious. Barely able
to speak, his face twisted with rage, Bush blurted out: "It's
not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would
you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when
you walked off the set in New York?" Bush's voice was
cracking with hysteria as he added, "Would you like
that?"
Dan Rather has been on the Bush family enemies list ever since.
But he's not alone.
Another member of the Bush family enemies list is Senator John
Kerry, who opened the precursor to the Iran-Contra investigations,
which brought about the demand for Casey's testimony. Kerry then
led inquiries into the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI),
which broke open a tangled web that included organized crime,
international terrorists, and members of both the Bush family and
the Bin Laden family.
Indeed, as The Wall Street Journal noted in a front page story
on December 6, 1991 ("Family Ties: How Oil Firm Linked To a
Son of Bush Won Bahrain Drilling Pact"/"Harken Energy
Had a Web Of Mideast Connections; In the Background: BCCI" by
Thomas Petzinger Jr., Peter Truell And Jill Abramson): "The
mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding Harken Energy may prove
nothing more than how ubiquitous the rogue bank's ties were. But
the number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken
-- all since George W. Bush came on board -- likewise raises the
question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a
presidential son."
This all came into the open because of the tenacious efforts of
former prosecutor and U.S. Senator John Kerry. As David Corn noted
in an
article first published in The Nation: "In the fall of
1992 Kerry released a report on the BCCI affair. It blasted
everyone: Justice, Treasury, US Customs, the Federal Reserve,
[Democrats] Clifford and Altman (for participating in 'some of
BCCI's deceptions'), high-level lobbyists and fixers, and the CIA.
The report noted that after the CIA knew the bank was 'a
fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use
both BCCI and First American...for CIA operations.' The report
was, in a sense, an indictment of Washington cronyism. In the
years since, there's been nothing like it."
Which brings us to what may be the most recent Bush family
political dirty trick.
Back during the years when BCCI and the Bin Ladens were helping
prop up one of George W. Bush's failing oil businesses, Karl Rove
was perfecting the art of using misdirection to win political
campaigns. James Moore and Wayne Slater, who wrote "Bush's
Brain" - the unauthorized biography of Rove - noted
that when Rove ran Bill Clements' campaign in Texas in 1986, he is
alleged to have bugged his own office to distract voters from the
real issues of the campaigns. "Who bugged Rove?" became
the big story in the news for weeks, pushing other issues off the
front page (and implying that Rove and his candidate were the
victims of dirty tricks). Rove's candidate won an upset victory.
Others have suggested - although there is no clear evidence one
way or the other - that Rove was behind the appearance in the Gore
campaign of Bush's debate prep notes. Had Bush "lost"
the debates in a big way, the issue could have been deftly shifted
to the Gore campaign having had advance copies of his notes.
Perhaps it's a short leap from bugging your own office, to
planting debate prep materials with your opponent, to placing
phony documents to kill an issue.
For example, Robert Sam Anson points out in a September 16,
2004 article in The New York
Observer that, "Mr. Rather's report hadn't been over 10
minutes when a post appeared on the right-wing Web site
FreeRepublic.com from 'TankerKC,' saying the documents were 'not
in the style that we used when I came into the USAF . can we get a
copy of those memos?'"
This was followed in a few hours by a detailed typographic
analysis from another blogger named "Buckhead" - even
though the typography had only been shown on television, not
exactly a medium conducive to examining typographic nuance.
The blog site that "broke" the story of the alleged
forgery of the documents Dan Rather had shown the world was, to
quote Robert Sam Anson, "the repository for anti-Jew,
anti-Catholic, anti-homosexual, anti-John Kerry rants by Jerome R.
Corsi, Ph.D."
For some, the name may sound familiar. As Anson continues:
"And whom, you ask, is Dr. Corsi? Co-author of the
best-selling 'Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out
Against John Kerry,' that's who."
And now we learn from CBS that "Buckhead" - the
blogger who posted to Corsi's website detailed information about
the memos' typography just 3 hours after the story had aired on
CBS - wasn't a typesetter or typographer at all. Instead, he's a
lawyer, Harry MacDougald, who the
LA Times notes, has "strong ties to conservative
Republican causes who had helped draft the petition urging the
Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the
Monica S. Lewinsky scandal" and has connections, at least
institutionally, to Ken Starr and other senior Republicans.
Most recently, it's been reported by The
New York Times that the Texas man who may have passed the
documents along to Dan Rather was Texas Air National Guard senior
advisor and former Lt. Colonel Bill Burkett.
In February of 2004, USA
Today reported Burkett claimed to have witnessed and overheard
senior Guard officers working to do a thorough
"cleansing" of George W. Bush's National Guard records
for a biography Karen Hughes was writing before his last run for
president. If true, Burkett - another Bush family enemy - is now
on the short list of potential fall guys in this case.
It's enough to make you wonder who's next on the schedule for
temporal-lobe brain surgery...
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project
Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a
nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann
.com His most recent books are "The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal
Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human
Rights," "We
The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What
Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
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